


Not The Type For Permanence

by LulaIsAKitten



Series: Denmark Street musings [42]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Conversations, F/M, Friendship, Ilsa is Strike’s agony aunt, Relationship Advice, Someone needed to say this to him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29060172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LulaIsAKitten/pseuds/LulaIsAKitten
Summary: I wanted to sit Strike down and lecture him on this after TB. So I had Ilsa do it.
Relationships: Ilsa Herbert & Cormoran Strike, Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Series: Denmark Street musings [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1035698
Comments: 47
Kudos: 115





	Not The Type For Permanence

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to sit Strike down and lecture him on this after TB. So I had Ilsa do it.

Ilsa flung open her front door and stood and stared at Strike, his head on a level with hers where he stood on the path that was two steps down from the front hallway. She blinked at him comically.

Her detective friend rolled his eyes. “Can I come in?”

Ilsa gave him a narrow-eyed look. “You’re early.” She glanced at her watch. “An hour early. What’s going on?”

Strike attempted a shrug, his gaze sliding from hers. “I was at a loose end, thought I’d head on over.” He vaguely waved a Waitrose bag, which clinked as he moved it, at her.

Grinning, Ilsa stepped forward and laid a hand on his forehead. Half-scowling, half-smiling, Strike ducked, swatting her away.

“Well, you’re not feverish,” she said, chuckling. “So you’re not ill. Come on in and tell me what’s up.”

“Nothing’s up,” he muttered as he slammed the door and followed her down the hall and into the kitchen. “I just felt like a beer in your garden, in the last of the sunshine—”

“Bollocks!” Ilsa interrupted cheerfully. “You’re never early, let alone this early. This is an unprecedented event. Open a beer, then,” she added as Strike dumped his heavy, clanking bag on the kitchen counter.

“Where’s Nick?” Strike glanced around, and warmth spread through him. The Herberts’ kitchen was as homely and welcoming as ever. Fresh flowers sat in a vase on the dining table, soft music played from the Bluetooth speaker on the counter. A takeaway menu lay on the counter next to his bag, a scribbled list in Ilsa’s handwriting indicating that she’d sorted the order already. The menu was almost superfluous to proceedings now - all four of them could order without recourse to it these days.

“In the shower,” Ilsa replied, reaching into the fridge for the wine bottle. “He only got back from work five minutes ago.”

Strike nodded, reaching into the bag he’d brought and extracting a beer. Ilsa slid open the drawer next to the fridge and passed him the bottle opener, then reached up to the cupboard above.

“Glass?” She waggled a pint pot at him.

“Nah.” Lid flipped, Strike took a draught of beer straight from the bottle. Ilsa set the pint glass back on the shelf and grabbed a stemmed one.

“Well, I’m using a glass. We’re not all uncouth.”

Strike chuckled, already moving towards the patio door, beer in one hand and the other delving into his coat pocket for his cigarette packet. “Drinking beer out of the bottle isn’t uncouth. Drinking wine out of the bottle definitely is.”

Smiling to herself, Ilsa poured a generous slug of wine into her glass and set the bottle back in the fridge door. She followed Strike out onto the patio. Two metal and wood chairs sat either side of the glass-topped patio table. Stretched out nearby on a warm flagstone, Ricky, one of the Herberts’ cats, raised a lazy head and watched Strike warily, but the big stranger settled into one of the chairs. He didn’t look to be in danger of getting too close, so Ricky lay back down again and pretended to ignore the humans, the tip of his tail flicking a little.

“Come on, then,” Ilsa demanded, plonking herself down in the chair next to Strike as he lit a cigarette and inhaled gratefully. “What’s going on?” She took a mouthful of wine and Strike blew smoke across the patio, watching it drift away on the breeze.

An infinitesimal pause.

“I slept with Robin.”

Ilsa spluttered and spat most of her wine; coughing and wiping at her chin with her hand, she stared at her friend, her eyes watering. “Oggy!”

Strike shrugged, looking half embarrassed and half, Ilsa noted, pleased with himself.

“Wh— Did— When?” she managed.

“Last night.”

“How?”

Strike quirked an eyebrow at her, and Ilsa laughed, recovering herself a little. “Oh, shut up, you know what I mean. How did that come about?”

He shrugged again. “Well, you know...”

Ilsa shook her head fondly. “Well, not all of us do, but yes, I know how it goes where you’re concerned.” She grinned. Her old friend had never seemed to have much trouble falling into bed with women. This was different, though.

“Okay, and?” she went on. “This is good, right? This is a...welcome development?”

Strike sighed and took another drag of his cigarette.

“Oggy?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Of course it is.”

Ilsa rolled her eyes fondly. “Corm, you’ve mooned over her for months—”

“I have not _mooned_ —”

“—like a lovesick teenager,” Ilsa spoke over him determinedly. “I’m amazed this hasn’t happened before now, frankly. So what’s the problem?”

Strike ran a large hand through his curly hair, scratching at his scalp. “No problem, as such. Just— what do I do now?”

Ilsa tilted her head on one side. “Well, how did you leave it?”

Strike shifted uncomfortably in his seat and took another swig of his beer. “I dunno.”

“Well, what did you say when you left? Or when she left?”

Strike drew on his cigarette again, staring out across the garden with its neat borders and the small raised bed towards the back where Nick was attempting, with moderate success, to grow garlic. “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to wake her.”

“Oh, Corm!”

His eyes flicked to hers briefly, guiltily. “What?”

“You left while she was asleep? Classic arsehole move.”

“It wasn’t like that,” he protested, determined to defend his corner even if it didn’t entirely merit defending, trying not to think about how incredible Robin had looked sprawled on her bed, her hair tangled and her lips pursed even in sleep. “I didn’t leave in the middle of the night like a complete bastard.”

“Well, what did you do, then?”

Strike sighed. He should have known Ilsa would show him no mercy.

“I stayed, we slept. Then we woke up and, well. We talked about breakfast but, ahem, never got around to it—” Ilsa was grinning and he could feel his cheeks heating up. “And then, you know, she was asleep again, and I was hungry and I needed a smoke, so I got dressed, and she was still asleep, so...” Strike shrugged.

“So you just left.”

“I texted her later,” he added defensively.

“And said what?”

“I thanked her for a nice evening.”

“Oh, _Oggy_!”

“ _What_?” She was glaring at him now, and Strike glared back, a nagging sense of guilt making him more belligerent.

“Things a woman doesn’t want to hear after sex - ‘thank you’. You eejit.”

Strike spread his hands in supplication. “What’s wrong with ‘thank you’? I had a good time!”

Ilsa rubbed her hands across her face. “How any man persuades a woman to sleep with him more than once is beyond me sometimes,” she said. “Did you say anything affectionate? I miss you, I’d like to see you again, that kind of thing?”

“Well, that would have been a bit redundant, wouldn’t it? I see her most days. I’m seeing her again tonight, here.”

“If she shows up,” Ilsa muttered.

“Why wouldn’t she show up?” Strike demanded.

Ilsa waved her arms vaguely. “Oh, I dunno, embarrassment because she shagged her boss and he left while she was still asleep and just texted her a ‘thank you’?”

Strike opened and closed his mouth, and rubbed big fingers across his forehead. “You’re making it sound way worse than it is.”

“Am I? Did you have any conversation last night that would give her the impression that you want more than just a casual shag?” Ilsa paused and stared at him, her eyes narrowing. “Wait. You do want more than just a casual shag, right?”

“Yes!” Strike exclaimed. “Yes,” he repeated, with a little less certainty. “I think so.”

“You _think_ so?”

Strike sighed and took another swig of his beer. There was a short pause.

“Well,” he said quietly. “This is where the problem is, isn’t it?”

Ilsa gazed at him for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said eventually. “Talk. Tell me what’s going on in that big, complicated brain of yours.”

Stalling for time, Strike drew a last drag on his cigarette and reached to stub it out in the ashtray his friends kept for his visits.

“Just— where do we go from here? How do I make this work? We run the business together, the business that we’ve built up from nothing, that is our lives, our livelihoods. What happens to all of that?”

Ilsa frowned. “Can’t you do both? I mean, I know you’ll be in each other’s pockets a lot, but you both have other interests, you can spend time apart if you want to. I’m sure Robin wouldn’t be clingy.”

Strike paused, picking a little at the label on his beer bottle, and then reached for his cigarette packet.

“Yeah, it would work for a while,” he said heavily, pulling a fresh cigarette from the pack. “We’d be happy for a while. But then what?” He put the cigarette to his lips and lit it, focusing on the task at hand, not looking at his friend.

Ilsa shrugged. “Well, then you’ll be happy some more,” she answered confidently.

“And then?”

Ilsa shook her head slightly. “Oggy, are you looking for problems before they exist?”

“No, I just—”

He paused. Ilsa waited.

“Just what?”

“I dunno. Just, things always end, don’t they? What do we do when it ends and we still have to run the business together? I don’t exactly have a good track record of staying friends with my exes.”

Ilsa snorted. “True that.”

Strike sighed. “You can joke about it, Ils, but this matters. I value Robin, she’s my best friend, she’s my business partner, and now we’ve gone and fucked all that up by...” He trailed off and Ilsa giggled.

Silence fell again.

“Yeah, but,” Ilsa said presently, slowly, “you already know how to be friends with Robin. You’ve done it for years. You have a blueprint to go back to if you split up.”

“I suppose.” But Strike looked, and felt, deeply sceptical about this prospect.

“And anyway, why would you split up?”

Strike waved an arm. “Because it’s me. It’s what I do. I don’t do permanent.”

“You managed sixteen bloody years of Charlotte,” Ilsa muttered.

“Exactly, and look what a mess that was. I’ve done love and commitment, Ils, the whole lot, and it was a fucking mess and I fucked it up anyway.”

“That wasn’t love, Corm,” Ilsa said quietly.

Strike scowled. “I know you all think that,” he retorted. “Various friends used to say it to me. ‘That’s not love, what she does to you.’ But I’ve never felt anything like that for anyone else.”

“Until Robin.”

Strike heaved a sigh, ran a big hand across his face. “That’s different.”

Ilsa leaned forward. “Different how?”

“Well, I dunno—”

“Then think about it. Because this might be the problem, Corm, but it’s also the answer. What you have with Robin is different.”

She sat back again, picked up her wine. “Robin complements you,” she went on. “Tracey was okay, but you guys were headed in different directions, anyone could see that. Elin was too...too cold, not enough spark for you. The two of you never looked like a couple, just like two people who happened to know each other. Lorelei was sweet, but she wasn’t really ‘you’ - I liked her, but she wasn’t a good fit. And Charlotte was a mad cow who didn’t deserve anything like the amount of time you spent on her.”

Strike barked a laugh. He’d known that Ilsa, of all his friends, particularly detested Charlotte. That Ilsa held that the behaviours Strike had attributed to Charlotte’s fragile mental state were nothing more than pure manipulation - “she can turn it off and on when it suits her, Corm” - and that, indeed, Ilsa and Nick, who was more reasonable on the subject, more inclined to take a clinical view, had rowed about Charlotte and Strike’s relationship, a fact Strike had hitherto chosen to ignore as being not his business.

“But Robin—” Ilsa’s voice softened. “I like Robin.”

“Everybody likes Robin.”

“For you, I mean. You two are good together. You have the same sense of humour. You both love the job. You’re different when she’s here, softer. And she’s different when you’re here. She sparkles, lights up somehow. You two are right together.”

“As friends, yeah, I totally agree. We get on great, she’s my best mate.” Ilsa stuck her tongue out at him and he laughed. “You’re one of my oldest mates,” he clarified. “She’s my closest.”

Ilsa nodded. “Bit closer now,” she added cheekily, and Strike flushed a little and busied himself stubbing out his second cigarette.

“But as more than friends...” Strike trailed off and took another swig of beer, stared morosely out across the garden again.

Ilsa sighed. “Why are you so convinced this won’t work out?”

Strike shrugged helplessly. “Because it’s me. And her. She was married, remember. She’s got parents who’ve been married for ever. It’s what she’ll expect. And she won’t get that from me.”

“Why not?”

“I’m just not cut out for it, Ils, not like the rest of you. I’m not the type for permanence. I’d have married Charlotte if I was.”

Ilsa sat back and took a large swig of her wine, thinking.

“That’s bollocks,” she said at last, and Strike laughed, startled.

“How so?”

“Several reasons,” she told him. “First of all, what if you’re wrong? What if the reason you never really committed to Charlotte—” She waved Strike away as he opened his mouth to contradict her. “I know you committed at the end, but only after more than ten years together, off and on. You can hardly blame her for not trusting in it. What if the reason you never committed was because you knew, deep down, that she wasn’t the one for you? The one true love?”

“Ilsa, you know I don’t believe in any of that shit. Destiny and one right person and all that. Life is what you make of it. Relationships are what you make of them.”

“Yeah, but you can’t build a good relationship with the wrong person. Okay, I get that there might be more than one right person for each of us. But what if Charlotte wasn’t one of them, and Robin is? Combination of personality, interests, timing. You might be more ready to settle down at forty than you were at twenty-five.”

Strike said nothing, picking thoughtfully at his beer label again.

“Plus, you have a skewed idea of relationships.”

“What?” Strike glared at her. “I came here looking for advice, not personal attacks.”

Ilsa grinned, disarming him. “If you came to me, you wanted honesty,” she told him. “If you want hand-holding and back-patting, go and see my husband.”

Strike chuckled and raised his beer to her in acknowledgement. “Go on, then.”

“You said something once that got me thinking. About being responsible for Charlotte, about only being able to cut her out of your life once she had her husband to look out for her.”

“I did?”

“It was a throwaway comment, when you told us you’d changed your number. You said she had a husband whose job it was to look out for her now.”

“Doesn’t mean the two were connected.”

“No, but it did show that you had been feeling responsible. And I think you’d felt responsible for her for a long time.”

“God, lawyers are almost as annoying as detectives.”

Ilsa grinned. “I know. But hear me out. You were always responsible for Lucy, from when we were small. Obviously you weren’t, but you felt like you were, trying to protect her from your mum’s crap.”

“She didn’t cope as well as I did.”

“Or she just showed more that she wasn’t coping,” Ilsa said sharply, and Strike closed his mouth firmly.

Sensing this wasn’t a topic that was up for discussion, Ilsa moved on. “And then when you were old enough, you felt responsible for your mum. And you went straight from that to Charlotte.”

“What is this, psychology 101?” Strike muttered.

“I’m just saying, I think you’ve come to believe that women need looking after. That in a relationship you’d always have to be the protector. Which in some ways is true,” Ilsa added airily. “If I hear a noise downstairs at night, I’m sending Nick.” She chuckled.

“But—” she leaned forward to emphasise her point “—Nick isn’t responsible for any poor decisions I might make. It isn’t up to him to rescue me, placate me, keep me happy, keep me safe. Or not only. We both support each other.”

“You two are happy, though—”

“And why shouldn’t you be?”

“It’s never happened before.”

“Because you’ve picked terrible women and then not committed to them.”

Strike sat back, shaking his head wryly. “Tell it like it is, why don’t you?”

Ilsa laughed. “Someone has to. And besides, we haven’t got to point three, which is the most important one.”

“Which is?”

“What if Robin doesn’t want permanence either?”

Strike scoffed. “Of course she does. She was made for marriage and children, a cottage in the country, a Labrador—”

“Was she? And who told you that?”

Strike hesitated. “Well, it’s obvious.”

Ilsa drained her wine glass. “Try asking her,” she replied drily. “Last time we had a girly wine evening and this came up, she told me she didn’t think she’d ever get married again.” Ilsa gave a small smile at Strike’s look of surprise. “Said she wants to focus on the job, on building the agency, on being herself, and she didn’t want to have to answer to anyone except herself ever again.”

Strike fell silent, remembering a whisky-fuelled evening in a darkening office, Robin saying she didn’t know if she wanted children. It had never occurred to him that she might not want marriage either.

“I wouldn’t expect her to answer to me, though.”

Ilsa picked up her wine glass and stood, waving to Nick who had just entered the kitchen, freshly showered and in a clean shirt and jeans. “I know you wouldn’t. But all she’s ever known is a mother and then a husband who did expect it of her. How’s she supposed to know you wouldn’t be like that unless you tell her? Ever thought that maybe she’d be just as surprised that you wouldn’t want to know her every move as you are that she might not want to tie you down? Another beer?”

Strike blinked. “What? Oh, er, yeah. Thanks.”

Nick poked his head out of the patio doors. “All right, Oggy? How’s things?”

“He slept with Robin,” Ilsa said, unable to resist. Strike rolled his eyes.

Nick raised an eyebrow. “Really? About time,” he said. “Did you phone the takeaway order in, Ils?”

“Yeah, it’ll be ready at seven,” his wife replied, moving to the counter to open another beer for Strike, who was trying to decide if he felt relieved or put out that his mate didn’t seem to find his news a big deal whatsoever.

“Thanks,” he muttered as Ilsa handed him the open bottle.

“Seriously, Oggy, you’re making too much out of this,” she said gently as the doorbell sounded behind her. “You’re single, she’s single, you both have the same aims.”

“I know,” Strike replied. “Fact remains that I’m fairly crap at this stuff. What if I fuck it all up?”

“Robin will sort you out,” Nick replied cheerfully, grabbing the car keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter. “She always does. I’m off to get the curry.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ilsa replied with rare tact, and they both headed towards the front door, leaving Strike to his beer and his thoughts.

He remembered Robin calling him out on things at work, and then treating him normally afterwards. He thought about her shouting at him on the street about his behaviour when he’d turned up blind drunk and ruined a dinner party, and how their easy relationship had been restored with a simple apology. No sulking, no atmosphere, no manipulation. No guilt trip, or throwing it in his face again and again...

“Hi,” came Robin’s soft voice, and he looked up to see her standing uncertainly in the patio doorway, beautiful as always in a soft blouse and jeans, her hair around her shoulders and her lips, he would swear, still slightly swollen from a night of kissing him.

“Hi,” he replied, a grin spreading across his face as it always did just at the sight of her.

“I’ll grab a glass,” she said, and Strike nodded. Robin disappeared back into the kitchen and returned a few moments later with a glass of wine and sat down on the chair Ilsa had vacated.

There was a pause while they admired the garden and Ricky eyed the new visitor and contemplated approaching. He preferred this one to the other. She was quieter, gentler.

Strike reached out and took Robin’s hand. She ducked her head a little, smiling softly, and squeezed his fingers.

“Sorry I left,” he muttered. “I, er, needed to think.”

Robin looked at him uncertainly. “And?”

Strike shrugged. “I’m not exactly a good bet, with my track record,” he replied.

She squeezed his hand again. “Me neither.”

“And I’m stubborn.”

“I know. Me too.”

He chuckled. “And I like my own space.”

She was grinning now. “Me too.”

“And— I’m afraid.”

“Me too,” Robin said quietly.

Strike tangled his fingers with hers. “So...?”

Robin took a sip of wine, peeping at him over the rim of her glass, then set it down again.

“Promise you’ll talk to me if anything’s bothering you,” she said.

“Okay. You too.”

“Okay. And if we screw up, work comes first?”

“Yup.”

“Well, then.”

He risked a glance at her. “Ilsa says we won’t screw up.”

Robin laughed softly, her eyes twinkling at him, so beautiful. “She knows? That’s why she squeezed me so hard. I couldn’t breathe for a moment there.”

“Yeah, sorry. I needed some sense knocking into me, and Ilsa’s the one to go to for that.”

She giggled. “That’s why you were early.”

“Yup.”

There was a pause. The two detectives held hands and looked out at the garden, at the leaves bobbing in the breeze, at Ossie, the Herberts’ other cat, curled up under the back fence.

“And did it work?” Robin asked presently.

“Did what work?”

“Did Ilsa knock some sense into you?”

Strike chuckled. “Yeah.”

“And?”

He turned to face her, set his beer down, looked into her blue-grey eyes, wide and vulnerable, searching his. He took hold of both her hands.

“I want this. Us.”

Robin’s eyes filled with tears. “Me too. I thought, when you left—”

“C’mere.” Strike pushed his chair back and tugged on her hands; Robin stood and moved across to him, letting him pull her down onto his lap. “I’m sorry, Robin. I panicked. I’ve messed up every relationship I’ve ever had—”

She giggled. “Me too. All one of it.”

Strike laughed. “I have more fuck-ups to my name.”

Robin shrugged. “We all have to stop somewhere.”

They gazed at one another, and the evening light cutting across the garden shone red gold on Robin’s hair, glinted off the silver flecks at Strike’s temples.

“So,” she said, smiling.

“So,” he replied, and grinned up at her. Robin leaned forward and kissed him slowly, sweetly, and then bent to bury her face in his neck, her head resting on his shoulder. Strike slid his arms around her and held her close, and peace descended on the little Wandsworth garden.

Long minutes passed, and they breathed together and sat. Feeling her curves against him, Strike couldn’t stop his mind drifting back to last night, to this morning, to the softness of her skin, the swell of her breasts, the way she—

The front door opened and Ilsa called a greeting; Strike was glad to have his thoughts dragged back to the prosaic. Robin kissed his neck softly, a gesture that was nearly his undoing with the direction his thoughts had taken, and then she sat up, smiling shyly at the Herberts as they bustled into the kitchen bearing carrier bags.

“Food’s up,” Nick called, grinning at their friends fondly, and Robin scrambled off Strike’s lap. His hand caught hers as she moved away and she stopped, smiling softly, as he pulled himself upright and tangled his fingers with hers.

“We grabbed some Prosecco from the offie, too,” Ilsa cried, already unwinding the wire and starting to ease the cork. “Decided it was an evening for bubbly.”

Grinning, a glow of hope in his heart, Strike allowed Robin to tug him into the kitchen.


End file.
